A very rich owner would be nice, but a vaguely competent one would be a huge improvement. There is no aspect of our football club that appears to be well run at the moment. The decision to give a ten year contract to those bumbling inadequates at Compass is symptomatic of the general malaise.
There has been quite a lot of research on what makes for an effective organisation (regardless of its line of business) and the common elements are around such things as strong and effective leadership; clear objectives; having a strategy which is well communicated and regularly reviewed; ensuring the constituent parts of the organisation know their contribution towards the objectives, have unambiguous targets and are held to account for their performance; hiring and retaining the right people; squeezing the best out of all available resources such as finance, people, data, etc.
I can't see any evidence of any evidence of anyone at SUFC even trying to put these things in place. As someone else said on another thread, the club feels like a lower league outfit in the 1980s, where people get jobs because they're a friend of the family rather than because they know what they're doing. So if the Prince is going to stick around, and I can't see him leaving now the club is worth less than he has put in let alone what he wanted to sell for, he at least needs to ensure the club is professionally run. He's not going to do it; he's thousands of miles away, as far as I'm aware he doesn't have any direct day to day organisational management experience and he has proved he knows little about the specifics of running a football club. I can see no evidence that anyone else on the Board has anything to offer other than the ability to make mincemeat of the dullards that McCabe employed as advisors.
So for me, his next most important appointments should be:
1. A Chief Executive who can put in place the systems and organisational infrastructure to make the club an effective and improving business
2. A Technical Director/Director of Football who can ensure that all of the football aspects of the club - analytics, scouting, recruitment, contract management, academy, medical, conditioning, training etc are all pulling in the same direction. The days of a manager running the first team and all other aspects of the football side of the club are long gone at the higher levels of the game.
I didn't want Wilder back, but he isn't the only problem, just a symptom of the wider problems at the club. Brighton probably have a list of people who are candidates to be the the next manager after the person who replace De Zerbi. When Hecky finally lost the plot and the will to live, we floundered around and apparently went for the first person we could find who was local and unemployed. We have a great deal of catching up to do, but we can do some of that without vast resources, just the intelligence to employ the ones we have much more effectively.
